Catalan Culture

Experimentation, Creative Imagination and the Relationship with Spain

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• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786832016
• eBook ISBN: 9781786832030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This volume presents studies of some of the key artistic manifestations in Catalonia in recent times, a period of innovation and experimentation, and addresses issues concerning literature, film, theatre and performance art. From the creation of a new popular theatre in the work of the Valencian playwright Rodolf Sirera, or the conception of landscape, myth and memory in the late work of the novelist Mercè Rodoreda and the urgency of memory and remembrance in the writings of Jordi Coca, the effects of censorship in Catalonia appear to have proved a spur and a challenge to writers. Desiring to occupy illegal spaces, performance groups have manifested both literally and metaphorically the international dimension of Catalan culture in the modern period, posed in the present volume by the instances of La Cubana and Els Joglars, and further evidenced in the cross-fertilization in the work of contemporary Catalan playwrights and filmmakers to foreground issues of national plurality and tensions arising between the periphery (Catalonia) and the centre (Spain and Castile).

Rodolf Sirera’s El verí del teatre (The Audition): Creating Performance, Reality and Politics On Stage

JOHN LONDON
Queen Mary, University of London

Introduction: A Popular Play

First written for Catalan television in 1978 and broadcast in October of the same year (in a production by Mercè Vilaret), El verí del teatre has developed into something of a theatrical phenomenon. Emilio Hernández’s staging of a Spanish version by José María Rodríguez Méndez in 1983 (at Madrid’s Centro Dramático Nacional) was revived in 1985 and went on to tour Spain in 1986. Starring José María Rodero and Manuel Galiana, it was also recorded for television. In addition to several productions in Catalan, another major Spanish production – this time directed by Mario Gas – premiered in 2012 prior to a national and South-American tour lasting one-and-a-half years. El verí del teatre has reached the status of a set text in schools of Catalan-speaking regions and the translation of the play into fifteen languages meant that Rodolf Sirera (b. 1948) became the first dramatist writing in Catalan since Àngel Guimerà (1845–1924) to see many significant productions of his work outside Spain. (This was just before a dramatist of a younger generation, Sergi Belbel (b. 1963), established his international reputation.) Moreover, the play has achieved such popularity, despite the author’s geographical origin (Valencia, not Barcelona), some dismissive reviews and the belief by admirers of Sirera’s drama that it is far from being his most interesting or original play.¹

Rodolf Sirera has argued that El verí del teatre is his most performed text because it is superficially easy to stage and has only two actors.² However, this does not adequately explain the attractions to both audiences and literary critics of a dialogue usually lasting barely an hour. As well as trying to account for the continuing fascination of this play, the aim of the present study is to trace the wider ramifications of its content. Through the analysis of its structure, its range of references and its political implications, the text can be seen to locate dilemmas of performance and social reality both in the immediate context of the 1970s and in a debate spanning centuries.

Structure: Stages of Deceit and Discovery

Much of the impact of El verí del teatre derives from its structure, a pattern of trickery in which information is provided and then subverted. Although the play contains no explicit division into acts or scenes, five main episodes structure the action, which takes place in Paris in 1784:³

1.In the first, the actor Gabriel de Beaumont, invited to the mansion of someone called ‘senyor marquès de …’ (‘Monsieur le Marquis de …’), is waiting impatiently for his host. A Servant – treated with haughty disdain by Gabriel – speaks with the actor about the acting profession and serves him a wine from Cyprus (pp. 91–95; 77–81).⁴

2.The Servant then reveals that he is in fact the Marquis himself and changes his appearance and delivery to prove it. He goes on to tell Gabriel about his theory of theatre, but Gabriel has fallen asleep and the Marquis gives him a drink from another bottle to keep him awake. The aristocrat then explains why he wanted to meet: he has written a play about the life of Socrates and wants Gabriel to play the part of the philosopher during his dying moments (pp. 95–105; 81–91).

3.Gabriel performs the monologue, but the Marquis is not pleased with it since, as he says, Gabriel’s way of acting ‘no arriba a transmetre allò que succeeix al personatge’ (‘doesn’t manage to convey what’s happening to the character’; pp. 106; 92). Gabriel feels dizzy and realizes that he has been poisoned (pp. 105–9; 92–96).

4.The Marquis proposes a pact: Gabriel will act the same piece again and, if the Marquis likes his performance, he will give the actor the antidote. Because Gabriel thinks that his life is at risk, his second performance is much more natural than his first (pp. 110–13; 97–9).

5.After the performance, the Marquis gives Gabriel a glass from which he drinks. However, the last surprise comes when the Marquis reveals that, far from giving Gabriel the antidote, he has just made him drink a lethal poison. Indeed, Gabriel seems to die on stage, although the Marquis announces that the actor will soon recover consciousness. The final words we hear are those of the Marquis: ‘Aquesta nit és una nit d’estrena, i la funció va a començar … ara mateix’ (‘Tonight is the opening night and the performance is about to begin … right now’; pp. 117; 103). The lights slowly go out and darkness covers the stage (pp. 113–17; 100–3).

Four major points emerge clearly from the outline of these sections. The first is the way in which the play sets up a situation, only to have it undermined by another fact: it seems there is a Servant (1) who is in fact the Marquis (2); the apparent realization of being poisoned (3) is mollified by the potential for an antidote (4); but the antidote was not necessary and a real poison is administered (5). Second, these reversals are part of a general patterning in which the control swings from Gabriel (1) to the Marquis (2), with possible interruptions while Gabriel performs and attempts to dominate the stage (3, 4), until the Marquis reasserts his authority (5). Third, the revelation of successive truths potentially exercises a power over the audience as well as Gabriel because we, like him (although perhaps one step ahead of him), think we know what is happening until another fact contradicts the ostensible situation. Fourth, it is easy to observe how the pace of the action accelerates: relatively little happens at the beginning, as ideas about acting are discussed (1, 2), after which it is a question of life and death, played out in moments of theatre within theatre (3, 4, 5). The longest episode (2) occurs towards the start, contains the greatest amount of exposition and, in effect, establishes the ideological and factual basis of the rest of the play.

These structural characteristics may display technical artistry and pinpoint how it works in the theatre, but they will also be important to show how the play embodies the theories exposed within it and manages to extend them.

Modern Precedents and Comparisons

If one ignores the ideas in El verí del teatre, its tricksy plotting – stemming from the conflictual pretence of two characters – provokes comparison with less intellectual drama. Critics have been keen to mention Sleuth as a precedent.⁵ Anthony Shaffer’s play, translated in a somewhat trimmed version as La huella, was produced in Madrid in 1970, months after its premiere in London the same year. While not reaching the five-year stint of the original English production, La huella was one of the most popular theatrical thrillers in the Franco period. The 1972 film of Sleuth, with Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, further increased Spanish awareness of the play and it was this version with which Sirera was familiar before writing El verí del teatre. (Shaffer’s plot was subsequently given a new lease of life on screen when Jude Law joined Michael Caine in a 2007 remake.)⁶

The similarities between the two plays are obvious. Both are essentially dialogues between two men: the Marquis and Gabriel; and thriller writer Andrew Wyke and the younger Milo Tindle. Sleuth also relies on the sort of suspense and trickery manifest in Sirera’s play. In the first act, Andrew persuades Milo to dress up as a clown and enact a robbery of Andrew’s house, but then seems to turn serious and kill him. In the second act, Inspector Doppler comes to Andrew’s house to investigate Milo’s death, but after a while, Milo reveals himself as Doppler and we learn that the shooting of the first act was with a blank (Milo fainted from fear). In another twist – similar to the desperate turns in the action of El verí del teatre – Milo then claims to have framed Andrew for the murder of Andrew’s girlfriend Tēa: Andrew has to find all the incriminating clues before the police arrive. But after he has done so, Milo tells him that this has also been a trick and that Tēa is alive. The deception in Sleuth is patently dependent on acting out imaginary characters and convincing lying: compare the Marquis’s Servant to Milo’s Doppler; or Marquis’s misleading use of drinks to Milo’s invention of a murder story. The Marquis seems more successful than Gabriel in his performances just as Milo is a more persuasive fabulist of detective plots than the professional writer Andrew.

What throw-away comparisons or claims of Sirera’s indebtedness to Shaffer fail to acknowledge, though, are the fundamental differences of motive and social context in the two plays. Sleuth is set in contemporary Wiltshire and the reasons for the main stages of the action are correspondingly domestic and petty. Andrew engineers the mock murder of Milo in the first act because the younger man is having an affair with his wife. Andrew is also motivated by snobbery and xenophobia; as he says before shooting Milo:

I hate you because you are a culling spick. A wop – a not one of me. Come, little man, did you really believe I would give up my wife and jewels to you? That I would make myself that ridiculous?

Likewise, underlying the argument between Shaffer’s characters and their panic is the notion of official justice or, put simply, being found out for crimes committed. This constant fear of the discovery of guilt culminates in the closing moments of the play when Andrew is so angered by Milo’s deception that he murders him for real: the stage directions indicate that a vehicle approaches and ‘a flashy blue police car light shines through the window’. So although Sleuth relies, like El verí del teatre, on deception through acting, it evolves into a parody of the detective story or thriller, rather than a piece of metatheatre. Andrew’s references to Agatha Christie and Nicholas Blake confirm this, as does Milo’s excoriation of the detective story as ‘the normal recreation of snobbish, out-dated, life hating, ignoble minds’. Integral to the thrill of the genre is – in contrast to El verí del teatre – actually showing the final killing taking place on stage (complete with blood).⁷

The continuing attraction of the formula of two characters in a constant duel of mutual deception can be seen in a film such as Duplicity (2009). However, a precise theatrical precedent to the period cruelty of El verí del teatre is Peter Weiss’s play (of 1964), known in its full title in English as The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Theatre Company of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. A censored Spanish production proved to be innovative and controversial in 1968, and Sirera saw Peter Brook’s film version. The comparisons in this case are historical and aesthetic. Since the cruelty of Sirera’s Marquis de … is an inevitable evocation of Sade (1740–1814), Weiss’s subject is relevant. Both aristocrats end up directing theatre within theatre and take a voyeuristic pleasure in the activity. Despite the huge cast in Weiss’s play, the singing and the dialogue in verse form, it has glimpses of the desires expressed in El verí del teatre. ‘Was wir tun ist nur ein Traumbild / von dem was wir tun wollen’ (‘What we do is only a vision / of what we want to do’) says Weiss’s Sade, imagining the most horrible tortures; while Sirera’s Marquis wants to put on stage ‘allò que no gosem de reconèixer ni d’acceptar en la nostra existència quotidiana’ (‘what we haven’t the courage to admit or accept in everyday life’; pp. 101; 87) and asks Gabriel if he does not envy the murderers he plays.⁸

Of course, the aestheticization of violence enacted on human beings – where private performances are played out for real – urges comparison with a different genre. It is not surprising that reviewers have seen Sirera’s drama as a theatrical version of the snuff movie. El verí del teatre has also been linked to the vogue for putting violent or humiliating personal video recordings – often made on mobile phones – on the Internet for public consumption. And if we require a sensationalist, twenty-first-century version in fiction for such activity, Stieg Larsson’s novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is unusually pertinent. Its principal villain, Martin Vanger, has spent years kidnapping, raping and killing women, and delights in watching home-made videos of his previous victims. Vanger even tells the hero of the story about a sense of social revolt in his cruel hobby: ‘You with your bourgeois conventions would never grasp this, but the excitement comes from planning a kidnapping.’⁹ This is not dissimilar to the Marquis’s declaration that the theatre should be ‘per damunt de totes les coses, el plaer de transgredir les normes establertes’ (‘above all, the joy of transgressing established norms’; pp. 100–1; 87).

The Instrinsic Wider Context

But while Sleuth is relevant in terms of ludic suspense and Weiss or Larsson provide parallels to the forms of violence, it is not just the different social context of El verí del teatre and the absence of any actual violence which set it apart. What contribute to the conceptual richness of Sirera’s play are the range and ramifications of the references cited in the dialogue. The first reviewer of the play – after it was broadcast on television – realized that it was a philosophical confrontation rather than a thriller. After all, the central trick of the action – the Marquis’s cruel manipulation of the poison – can hardly be conside...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• David George: Two personal recollections
• David George: Publications
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• A ‘Natural History’ of Return: Landscape, Myth and Memory in the Late Work of Mercè Rodoreda
• ‘La totalidad de la obra se representará en perfecto castellano’: Censorship of Theatre in Catalonia after the Civil War
• Rodolf Sirera’s El verí del teatre (The Audition): Creating Performance, Reality and Politics On Stage
• ‘Antes eterna o negra que rota’: ¡Ay, Carmela! and the Mythic Unity of Spain
• ‘… And the Great Bird of War Flew Past with Its Wings Outstretched’: The Aesthetic Recreation of Trauma in Jordi Coca’s Sota la pols (2001)
• Unmasking the Mask: Controversia del Toro y el Torero (Els Joglars, 2006) and the Craft of Theatremaking
• On Influence, Tradition and Other Anxieties: Some Dilemmas of the Contemporary Catalan Stage
• La Cubana in the Twenty-first Century: The Popular and the Political
• Tabula Gratulatoria